


A is for Arsenic

by Tekhnetos



Category: Sonic the Hedgehog (Video Games), Sonic the Hedgehog - All Media Types
Genre: Introspection, M/M, Maybe - Freeform, Murder, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings, arsenic - Freeform, mentioned poisoning, or mentions thereof at least
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-12-03 06:40:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11526657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tekhnetos/pseuds/Tekhnetos
Summary: Murder is easy and mercy is the virtue of the strong. Neither of these things matter at all.





	A is for Arsenic

When every last deception had been stripped away, when all the excuses had run out and the truth was plain too see, Metal Sonic knew this: He could easily have killed Sonic the Hedgehog by now. 

The task would not have even been difficult, Sonic was after all, a simple mobian. He had the same weaknesses as everyone else. Flaws in his design that made Metal inherently superior. He could get sick. His bones could break and his flesh could tear, taking time to heal. He could be poisoned. And really, while Metal might never have though of it when he had just been created - after all, he had been a match for Sonic by imitating him, and Sonic would have never have thought of such a plan - he had grown different from his counterpart as time had gone by working under Eggman. A different environment made for a different person after all. 

Poison was as common a method of killing as anything else, it was inevitable that he should eventually come to think of it. A logical conclusion gained from examining all possibilities. Its existence as an option could not have stayed unknown to him forever. 

The Doctor’s way of manufacturing the metal that was needed to support all of his inventions would have it made it laughably easy to obtain what he would need to commit the act. The iron and lead ore mined by the robots that Eggman used for menial labour was oftentimes contaminated with arsenic after all. Arsenic was the fourteenth most abundant element in the earths crust, of course it would be there. And when the ore was smelted down the arsenic would mix with air in the furnaces; forming a thick coating of arsenic trioxide on the inside of the chimneys that had to be cleared out regularly and dumped off somewhere with the rest of the waste. Arsenic trioxide had a long history as a prominent poison, the white powder was tasteless, odourless, and lethal in even very small doses. He would need less than five grams and he had hundreds. It even gave the appearance of natural causes of death. Metal could have as much of it as he wanted at any given time. None of the other robots would dare stop him and very few even had the intelligence to question his actions in the first place. Sonic was so often away running that no one would notice that he should have come back for weeks at least, maybe even months if Metal chose the timing carefully. It would have been so easy. Simple. Murder was easy.

Eggman was too focused on his machines, on brute force as the only possible approach, and it had caused him to pass his other options by. He had to be somehow bigger than everyone else, his plans needed to be spectacular, noteworthy in every sense of the word, and everyone had to know that it was Eggman that had done it. He never would have settled for anything less. He needed everyone to know of his genius, he needed to be larger than life. It was one of the biggest reasons that his plans always seemed to fail; they branched out and collapsed under their own weight, or they were too obvious to avoid detection for long enough to gain the momentum they would need to succeed. Metal Sonic had no such blind spot. He had been given a goal and a bare minimum of rules guiding exactly how he went about achieving it. He could have done it. He could have been subtle enough to avoid detection until it was too late. Eggman would even have been able to have his customary grandstanding afterwards, Metal could have brought him the body. 

But Metal had not done it. It had been Sonic the Hedgehog who had taught him - as contradictory as it had sounded - that mercy was the virtue of the strong. The only way anyone could have mercy on anyone else, by definition, was if they were stronger than that person in the first place. You had to have power over others for you to have mercy on them. Sonic could have destroyed Eggman long before Metal was even created, Sonic could have destroyed Metal himself with a little help from his friends, but he had not done so. Sonic could afford to have mercy on his enemies only because he was stronger than they were. Mercy was an attribute of strength, this Metal had learned from his counterpart in a harsh lesson that Eggman himself had yet failed to learn. It was perhaps the first in a series of significant revelations brought on by his counterpart. Even this though, was not what had stayed Metal’s hand.

At the end of the day, Sonic had many interesting things to teach if Metal would just pay attention. Although, he had also found over time that the things worth learning were rarely related to fighting. Things like; how to laugh, what joy was, and what it actually was to be alive. How to be a person. It had been Sonic who had insisted that Metal could be a person, even if he was a machine. It was a liberating realisation. One that Eggman would doubtless disapprove of if he had known. The things Metal learned from Sonic were often things that Eggman would have disapproved of. Machines had no need for emotion. They did not need to appreciate life. Nevertheless, Metal did anyway. What was known could not be un-known after all.

As Metal sat beside his counterpart on a hill somewhere far away from Eggman, far away from anything else but the world around them, as they gazed up at the stars and kept each other company, he knew that the real reason that he had not acted on his orders was simply that he did not want to. Metal now knew that he was free to make his own choices. And when Sonic turned and smiled at him he knew that he did not want the hedgehog to die. Perhaps no other justifications were necessary.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what this even is and I'm not particularly confident about it, but it's done now so it's going up anyway. On a side note: the industrial effort necessary to produce all the metal and other things that Eggman needs to build the ridiculous shit he does and the effects of it are somehow a very interesting topic to me.


End file.
